OpenGL Forums will be upgraded this weekend

We will be upgrading these OpenGL forums this weekend. After a very lengthy relationship with UBB Threads, we felt that feature for feature, moving to vBulletin was the best way to move forward at this point in time.

This weekend we will be closing these forums and moving everything to vBulletin.

All the accounts will continue to work, all the posts will be there, and all the inbound links will continue to work.

The new forums offer a few significant improvements:

- most notably a Mobile theme making it much easier to use the forums from your mobile.
- Easy to use attachment interface
- Cleaner interface
- a very robust caching system, which will make the forums load faster
- more meaningful url's which are also more search engine friendly, which means it will be easier to find things on forums
- a complete feature list is available here: https://www.vbulletin.com/index.php?do=features

If you have any questions or concerns, please post them here. I'll be happy to answer the best I can.

Re: OpenGL Forums will be upgraded this weekend

Redirects will work without issue. We've built in some apache redirects for threads and posts.

vBulletin is a bit of a love it or hate it application. If it is properly setup, it works very well, and people tend to love it.

To answer many of the concerns from the negative folks in the comparison you pointed too:

- UBB threads, which it seems an overwhelming majoritoy of the comments are on about, has, to me, a dubious future. The founder Rick, has been flip flopping on selling the company, buying it back, closing it, opening it... who knows what's next. I didn't feel comfortable with that when it comes to something so important as the OpenGL forums. I want to ensure the company behind the product is solid. UBB has been pretty good overall, but I've found upgrades are lagging and features to fit todays internet are totally lacking.

- Support complaints. Many forum software companies offer some sort of free support. vB doesn't, but they are very fast at getting back to you. If the forums go down, I don't fancy waiting for support. vB is a solid company.

- Features. Hard to find another forum that compares feature for feature. One of the deal breakers for the ARB, was to have a decent mobile theme, which the new forums have.

- Mod/addons. vB has a good collection of authorized mods. I get tired of trying hacks which break on upgrade, from other forums. vB has a ton of mods too. Though, the feature set is so rich, I can't complain with the base install.

- Search: vBulletin offers two types of search: vBulletin search and MySQL fulltext search. Rather, they used to offer, two. vBulletin search was a bit sketchy, which could explain why it is no longer. MySQL Fultext search is great! However, it takes forever to initially index. The reasons might explain the complaints about search.

My understanding from most peoples comments, both from the post above and from my own experience, is that vB does take a bit more to get working smoothly. Upgrades are not super straight forward, but are solid. In almost 10 years I have never had an issue with upgrades, which is a pleasant change from most software upgrades.

Check your PMs in 2 minutes, I've given you the login and URL for the new forums.

I've emailed all the moderators a couple of days back, but haven't received any comments from them yet. Trusting that no news is good news.